260 Aristotle and his school
Among the relatively few scholars who have occupied themselves with
this work (on which the last monograph dates from 1911 ),^3 it has been
the source of continuous disagreement. Apart from numerous difficulties
of textual transmission and interpretation of particular passages, the main
issues are ( 1 ) whether the work is by Aristotle and, if so, ( 2 ) whether it
is part ofHistory of Animalsas it was originally intended by Aristotle or
not,^4 or, if not, ( 3 ) what the original status of the work was and how it
came to be added toHistory of Animalsin the later tradition. From the
eighteenth century onwards the view that the work is spurious seems to
have been dominant,^5 with alleged doctrinal differences between ‘Hist. an.
10 ’ and other writings of Aristotle, especiallyGeneration of Animals(Gen.
an.), constituting the main obstacles to accepting the text as genuine. These
concerned issues such as the idea that the female contributes seed of her
own to produce offspring, the idea thatpneumadraws in the mixture of
male and female seed into the uterus, the idea that heat is responsible for
the formation of moles, and the idea that multiple offspring from one
single pregnancy is to be explained by reference to different places of the
uterus receiving different portions of the seed – views seemingly advocated
in ‘Hist. an. 10 ’ but explicitly rejected inGeneration of Animals. In addition,
arguments concerning style (or rather, lack of style), syntax and vocabulary,
as well as the observation of a striking number of similarities with some
of the Hippocratic writings, have been adduced to demonstrate that this
work could not possibly be by Aristotle and was more likely to have been
written by a medical author.
This view has in recent times been challenged by at least two distin-
guished Aristotelian scholars. J. Tricot conceded that there were differences
of doctrine, but argued that ‘Hist. an. 10 ’ represents an earlier stage of
Aristotle’s thinking on the matter which he later abandoned and critically
reviewed inGeneration of Animals.^6 More recently, David Balme has ar-
gued that the accounts inGeneration of Animalsand ‘Hist. an. 10 ’ do not
contradict each other and that there is no reason to assume that the latter
work is not by Aristotle – indeed, Balme claimed that our interpretation
(^3) Rudberg ( 1911 ). For some briefer discussions see Aubert and Wimmer ( 1868 ) 6 ; Dittmeyer ( 1907 )
v; Gigon ( 1983 ) 502 – 3 ; Louis ( 1964 – 9 ) vol.i, xxxi–xxxii and vol.iii, 147 – 55 ; Peck ( 1965 ) lvi–lviii;
Poschenrieder ( 1887 ) 33 ; Rose ( 1854 ) 172 ff.; Spengel ( 1842 ); Zeller ( 1879 ) 408 ff.
(^4) It should be noted that the question of ‘belonging toHistory of Animals’ does not necessarily depend
on the book’s Aristotelian authorship being settled, if one is prepared to consider the possibility (once
popular in scholarship but currently out of fashion) thatHistory of Animalswas, from the start, a
work of multiple authorship.
(^5) For a survey of older scholarship see Balme ( 1985 ) 191 – 206.
(^6) Tricot ( 1957 ) 17.